William A. Dembski switches allegiance from intelligent design

William A. Dembski, one of the leading lights of Intelligent Design has renounced the ideological religious movement to return to the bosom of science, and all it took was a small rock.

"One of the reasons I couldn't believe in evolution," said Dembski, "is that I always thought there hand't been enough time since God created the heavens and Earth. If you do the calculations in the Bible you get nine thousand, three hundred and ninety-one years, twenty-eight days and four hours old. I can't get it any more accurate without learning Hebrew to read the original."

Such was Dembski's conviction in the age of the Earth that the 2004 Antarctic ice core that had distinct annual layers numbering seven hundred and fifty thousand was dismissed as assumptive. Assuming that there is only one summer a year, which blatantly cannot be proved by anything other than Newtonian orbital mechanics and lots and lots of people writing things down, but not in the Bible, and therefore must be inaccurate.

However, Dembski's world was rocked by a rock.

No ordinary rock. This rock smashed through the roof of Dembski's car as he drove to a lecture, completely writing it off. The lecture and the car.

"I had an anti-epiphany," he said. "I realised looking at the crater on my car that the moon was full of such craters. And what's more, some of these craters are in other craters, and some of them have been weathered, despite the lack of weathering on the moon. I stood there looking at my insurance write off, and I realised that the moon must be pretty old. I checked my illustrated children's copy of the Bible, and saw a moon in it that had craters."

In addition, Dembski went onto find all the craters he could see today on images of the moon depicted on Egyptian tombs and Polynesian jars.

"I don't trust these dating techniques," said Dembski. "But Egypt's mentioned in the Bible, pretty early on. And the moon had craters then. The same craters as today. I realised that it could really be getting on for billions of years old, and that an asteroid could have wiped out the dinosaurs millions of years ago. The thought blew me away. And when you're looking at evolution over those time scales, it suddenly makes sense."

Richard Dawkins still frisked Dembski before allowing him into the Cambridge university cafeteria.

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